


monachopsis

by typervoxilations



Series: seventy years of sleep [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M, how do you even tag this, meta-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 03:49:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8148200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typervoxilations/pseuds/typervoxilations
Summary: He is a man out of his time, a man out of time. It’s subtle, small – but so is a splinter, and eventually it will start to ache and ache, like the bittersweet pain of pressing a bruise, the teeth of gears that are just a little bit imperfect for each other. He doesn’t belong, in this era of fancy gadgets and silent wars that are fought without being fought, and nothing lets him forget it. Or, into the mind of Steve Rogers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the observations of many, many people and rewatching all of Cap’s movies again and again - _Civil War more like Civil Why amirite hahahasob_ \- and crying over Steve and Bucky. Mostly crying over Steve and Bucky? Always crying over Steve and Bucky. I am not sorry. Also I’m just going to pretend that Sharon kiss in Civil War didn’t happen because to be perfectly honest it felt kind of severely out of place, not just because I ship the frozen popsicles, or Steve and Peggy. 
> 
> And heck yes, you better expect a Bucky piece after this.

 

_**monachopsis** (n.) [mô-na-käp-sis] _

  1. _the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place._



 

* * *

 

 

He forgets too, sometimes, that he might have survived nearly a hundred years but he’s not _actually_ ninety seven years old, excluding technicalities.

It’s been ninety seven years since the moment he took his first breath but-

 

( He’s almost twenty two – it’s 1940 and he loses the only parent he has, buries her in a modest grave because that’s all he can afford, next to the parent he’s never known, and there’s a hollow feeling echoing in his birdlike bones as he fumbles with the keys to the apartment, but at least, _at least,_ there’s still the ever present familiarity of a warm hand on his shoulder, a grounding sort of weight and _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal._ )

( At least, he thinks, even if he has nothing else, he will have Bucky. )

 

Natasha makes jabs at his age all the time, and his lips quirk because she is the closest thing to _friend_ that he’s had in - _years, decades, century_ \- forever, but none of them ever let him forget and he’s not quite sure he’s every going to stop being the soldier stuck in the quicksands of his memories of mud and cold and gunfire, the sharp chill of speeding wind as he reaches, reaches-

 

( His fingers - _heart_ \- are numb as they close around nothing. )

 

He forgets a lot of things, actually; that it’s not the nineteen hundreds, that this is his team but not _his team_ ( Tony swears and his reprimand accidentally slips out, and it makes for a good laugh later, but at that moment his breath catches in his throat when he remembers other people at his back, laughing and swearing in French and broken German, and his heart _twists_ ), that he’s old but he’s not really all that old at all.

They look to him to make the choices like he actually has the experience of almost a hundred years of living and they forget that he was actually, technically _dead_ for seventy of them as the world moved on without him.

 

( He’s not supposed to regret it, maybe. He’s _Captain America_ , he’s punched Hitler in the face hundreds of times, and everyone thinks he’s supposed to be perfect and composed and to know exactly what he’s doing, but he looks back at waking up in that room that felt wrong, the radio playing a baseball game he’d been present at, and maybe, maybe he wishes that he hadn’t woken up at all. )

( He’s Captain America and maybe, _maybe_ he wishes he could just be _Steve._ )

 

This isn’t what he had imagined for himself, when all he wanted was to prove everyone wrong.

 

( He had been just Steve once; Rogers, for a time – but ultimately people tend to forget the person behind the shield, forget that he’s just still that little guy from Brooklyn who hated bullies and just wanted to do the right thing. )

 

" _Je croyais que tu étais plus qu'un bouclier_." Batroc sneered at him once - _I thought you were more than just a shield_ \- and something awful settles in his chest. What does it say about him, about what he does, who he fights for, that these are the words that strike truer than physical blow, an arrowhead straight to the heart of something resentful and bitter and probably better off unnamed?  _"Voyons voir."_ He mutters back, but would they?

 

( He had been just Steve once, to the two people who mattered the most; but he’s slow, slow, too slow, out of time – seven seconds too slow to save one and seventy years too slow to come back to the other, and now he is just this: Captain America, figurehead, tool, shield. )

 

What is the right thing anymore?

He wakes up seventy years after he thinks he should have died and he thinks he has a purpose.

There has to be, otherwise what was the point?

There has to be, or he’ll lose his way.

 

( If he lets himself think, he'll lose his  _mind_ \- so instead he throws himself into the fray. Tackling aliens and sentient robots isn't all that different from tackling Hydra foot-soldiers, and both are a far cry easier than trying to wrestle with the demons lurking in memories thrown into too sharp relief. Anything but ice and cold, a sliver of black river set against unforgiving white cliffs and the way the howling winds stole the screaming that was in his head. )

 

He thinks he knows what it’s like to die – but he doesn’t actually, until he’s staring into the face of a person he’s lost once before and the words that are spoken passively, blankly, as if it doesn’t matter, feels a thousand times worse than plunging several hundreds of feet into the ice in a flying metal death trap – _Who the hell is Bucky?_

 

( It turns out he’s seventy years too slow for the both of them, and he’s not sure what makes him feel worse. )

( In their own ways, they’ve both forgotten him, too. )

 

He forgets why he wanted to be a part of the fighting in the first place, because now all he sees is meaningless violence and bloodshed and he’s sick of it, but this is what he had been bred to do. This is what he asked for. That little guy from Brooklyn who wanted to prove himself so badly - well this was it wasn't it?

“We’re not at war anymore,” Maria Hill tells him, when he opens that file and is greeted with two faces far too young to have eyes that hard, that haunted - eyes too much like the ones that judge him from the bathroom mirror - the lines of their faces set with the blind purpose of devotion to something he might have once known.

 _“They_ are,” he answers, and exhales when the elevator doors close as he steels himself because he knows, _he knows,_ this is war and everything is permitted.

 

(  _I_ am, he doesn't say. )

( He fights with Tony about it all the time, and after Sokovia, the fight only becomes more literal.

“Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?” He’d asked once, when they had lost Phil Coulson and Loki had peeled them all raw.

“We are _not_ soldiers.” Tony shot back, hard edge to his tone.

And Steve agrees, to an extent, and this was the moment he should've looked back on because post-Sokovia was a long time coming, wasn't it? Tony isn’t a soldier - Tony’s a hero. It’s supposed to be a hero’s job to protect civilians, not drag them into it. But it’s been seventy years after the second World War for Tony and less than a handful for Steve, the memories of the realities of war are still sharp and insistent in his mind. War makes no distinction between anyone, and when your country calls you to serve, you step up to the plate. Steve isn’t a hero - Steve’s a soldier. Born, bred, died. And he’s never really stopped being one, not really.

The war has never really been won and the world is still under draft. )

 

 _What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on ‘em to protect their country?_ They were _meant_ to be barbed wire and maybe he’s feeling a little too defensive about it, maybe, maybe, but the words dig into his skin until he’s bleeding, shrapnel in his veins slowly inching towards his heart – Erskine’s gasping for breath in his last moments and raises a hand to point at his chest – _good becomes great, bad becomes worse; this is why you were chosen,_ silently, silently, _don’t forget that little guy from Brooklyn, hold on to the reason you are who you are_ – and in that split second he doesn’t think there’s anything ‘good’ about him at all.

 

( His weapon is a shield because he’s meant to _protect_ because that’s what good soldiers are supposed to do isn’t it? )

( Except he looks back and he’s failed spectacularly at the only thing he was _supposed_ to do, lost every one of the important people in his life; the man who gave him a chance, the woman he loved once upon a time, his best friend - a country.

Except he has a wake up call and no, good soldiers are supposed to follow orders and it turns out maybe he’s not a good soldier after all. )

 

His shoulders are a little hunched, sitting next to Wanda, guilt for a mission gone wrong that could either be hers or his own, maybe both. "We try to save as many people as we can; sometimes that doesn't mean everybody." He tells her, and she looks at him like she’s trying to figure out who he’s saying the words for, her or himself.

Maybe both.

 

( A brief bitter thought, the realization that the people he worked for weren’t the people he thought they were, people with agendas weren’t the people he could _trust_ , and maybe he’s permitted this. Cold and ice and howling winds batter at his brain and he tries to smile to make up for the inferno of an explosion that killed too many innocent people that is probably beating at her's and he hopes it isn't as brittle as it feels. )

 

They force him to make a choice.

Freedom, or safety.

Freedom, or equality.

Their way or the highway.

 

( Like it's even a choice. )

( “This isn’t freedom.” He pointed out once to Fury, heli-carriers ready to shoot down even the hint of potential misdemeanor, like some warped vision pulled right out of _Minority Report_. “This is _fear_.” But it’s been so long, he’s not sure anyone recognizes the difference anymore. )

 

Director Ross frowns at them over a meeting table and he clenches his fists beneath glass.

The devastation of New York, London, Sokovia, Lagos - all drawn up in a neat line even if the reality has never been that simple and Steve bites back words that have his jaw working, the urge to argue, near overwhelming. _And what about the nuclear missile you were planning on dropping on the aliens in New York_ , he wants to snap. _The one that would have killed even more people if Tony goddamn Stark hadn’t done something about it. The people who would have died if Sokovia had been utilized the way Ultron planned to have used it. The innocents in the marketplace who would have been caught in the blast if Wanda hadn’t done what she had._ He’s just a kid from Brooklyn - the bullies have cornered him in the alley behind the theater again and there’s no Bucky to come swooping in to save the day this time.

 

( He forgets, that sometimes the rest of them don’t think in terms of _acceptable loss_ like he does, but he is a soldier, born, bred, died, and he feels the cracks in the ice widen a little more, feels himself slip through and he’s losing his footing, this isn’t what he was woken up to do. )

( _She’s gone. In her sleep_. The breath’s been punched out of his chest and he is drowning in ice and cold again. They'd never gotten their dance, and the thought is numb. It's cruel but the first thing he remembers is a dream, Peggy, young and beautiful and dressed for dancing, _we can go home_. One gone, one left. All it was, was just a dream. He is a soldier who is never coming home from the war and she... she is _gone_. )

( He feels the emergency stairway railing bite into his back because he doesn't even have the energy to hold himself upright, where no one else can see him, let alone the weight of everything else trying to crush him all at once, and what is he supposed to do? )

 

“You don’t deserve it.” Tony spits at him. _“My father made that shield_. _”_

And that's it. There's the answer he's been looking for all this time.

He lets it fall from his numb grip, and this is what he should have let go in the first place.

Because.

He’s realized what’s important.

 

( He needs both hands to haul Bucky to his feet and keep him upright. )

 

And this. 

He wants to laugh at  _this,_ because once, Colonel Chester Phillips had told him that the 107th Infantry Regiment was lost and so was his chance of saving Bucky but he hadn't even cared then. He'd risked everything to go out there, to drag him back and out of the fire. It hadn't mattered if they were going to take his rank or anything else away from him, hadn't mattered when he got Bucky back, bruised and battered and _different_ but  _alive,_  and here he was, doing it all over again. 

No more Captain America.

Not like this.

Right now, _right now_ , until… _whenever_. He can’t be Captain America. He needs to be _Steve_. And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what it should have been all along. All these years awake after the ice and it’s never really come into perspective how _important_ that was. 

And Tony is-

Tony is his friend. That will never stop being a fact. They’re standing on different sides of the cracks but Steve will never begrudge him for standing firm in his beliefs.

 

( And that’s why he writes, after. Needs to make sure Tony _knows_ that. He doesn’t expect a response. Doesn’t need one. )

 

But so is _Bucky_ and there isn’t even a choice. 

 

( Tony is his friend but even when he had nothing else, he had _Bucky_. )

 

There shouldn’t have to be one, but this was a long time coming. Because for Tony, the population is full of Charles Spencer's but Steve closes his eyes and remembers that the second World War ranked third in terms of people - _soldiers_ \- killed. Because Tony is the self-made hero who needed someone to be held accountable for something, everything, _anything_ , and Steve had to break away from a compromised mindset that threatened what he was created to stand for too many times to back down now, and ever. 

 

( Losses were only acceptable if, in the end, they won the war. )

 

Because Bucky blames himself for everyone he had killed and so does Tony, so does a lot of other people, but Steve is the only one who doesn’t want him dead for the things he couldn’t control.

 

( The war has never really been won and the world is still under draft, but this, here, _his_ war, it’s over. )

 

“It’s better for everyone.” Bucky says, and Steve doesn’t reply when the glass goes up, but he’s never really needed to say much, with Bucky.

 _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,_ and they both know Steve's not going to go anywhere.

 

( He is a man out of his time, a man out of time. It’s subtle, small – but so is a splinter, and eventually it will start to ache and ache, like the bittersweet pain of pressing a bruise, the teeth of gears that are just a little bit imperfect for each other. He doesn’t belong, in this era of fancy gadgets and silent wars that are fought without being fought, and nothing lets him forget it.

He does not have a shield to hide behind any longer, but for once, staring at the peaceful face he thought he had lost forever, finally able to set down the weight of expectation he hadn’t realized he had picked up, he thinks he doesn’t need it anymore.

He had opened his eyes in a world that had moved on without him, but at this moment he's allowed to close his them and think, _let it_. )


End file.
